Sunday, March 30, 2014

I attended the Vermont Google Boot Camp and Summit this weekend, where I learned so many new things that my brain is oozing information! Luckily, most of the presenters linked their presentations to the Web for easy access later!

I'd like to report that I bravely took part in one of the demo slams, but I didn't fully gather up the courage that I needed to transform intent into action. With encouragement from a friend at Brown's River Middle School, I am going to try to be a little braver in the future.

My goal for my next post is to test out a private Google hang-out, Snag-it, or Screencastify to teach a trick with Google Drawings! Now that Google Drawings has added increased functionality in the form of cropping and masking tools, the possibilities are virtually limitless!

Saturday, March 15, 2014

PowToon EDU is a fun way to create animated presentations using creative templates. While I was out sick, I decided that PowToon would be a perfect way to communicate with students from home while they have a sub.

Here is my first PowToon. I think that students would really enjoy the process of using this for school projects!

You may embed your work directly from the app or upload it to YouTube, which I personally recommend. When I pasted the embed code, my presentation was not viewable on an iPad.

Here is my second PowToon, using a different template. These presentations could easily be added to ThingLink projects, too!

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I've left the original embedded presentation here, at the bottom of this post, to serve as an example (in case you are viewing it from an iPad.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

This afternoon, my 14-year old daughter and I decided to create our first animation using the iStopMotion app on my iPad. She drew the background and I molded the aliens. We worked together to move the characters, and I manned a remote camera on my iPod. Through this process, I learned that it's important to position the camera horizontally rather than vertically!

Saturday, March 8, 2014

As a requirement for a class that I'm taking, I combined the use of Google Drawings, Pixlr photo editor, an animation app on my iPad, iMovie, and YouTube video editor to create a visual essay. I enjoyed the process.

For the first five years of my career, I taught middle and high school students history and language arts in Vermont. More recently, I've been teaching workshops related to the maker movement and educational tech.